And these principles, which perhaps serve even some professed Liberals mainly as a ground for doing nothing, were with him a ground for insisting on an act of justice and expediency which such Liberals have been very loth to accede to. Bradlaugh's action in the great test case of recent English politics is a decisive proof of his foresight. § 5. As the story of his life has shown, Bradlaugh had had special opportunities of studying the Irish question from the inside; and from the day when his young blood boiled at the murderous cruelty of an Irish eviction, he steadfastly supported the cause of the misruled Irish people. He never ceased to love England with that touch of pride and faith which is the whole stock-in-trade of the average patriot; but, combining it as he did with an intense sense of justice, he could never let that devotion blind him to the wrongs of other peoples at England's hands. And in the first years of his political activity, when he was pleading for rebel Poles and rebel Italians, he seems to have so far recognised the right of Irishmen to use force against the force of England, that he assisted the Fenian conspirators of 1867 to draw up their Republican proclamation, so revising it as to exclude every expression of race hatred and every appeal to religious feeling; "the complete separation of Church and State" being one of its stipulations. The full details of that connection will probably never now be known; but what is quite clear is that Bradlaugh was not only then opposed to the idea of an Irish Republic, but soon ceased to have the least faith in the possibility of a successful or even a well-planned Irish rising; while his invariable opposition to useless violence was emphatic in the case of the Clerkenwell and other outrages. All the more earnestly did he continue his propaganda for Irish reform. Holding as he did that the land question was fundamental in English politics, he could not but see that it was the very heart of the Irish trouble; and to the agitation for Irish land law reform he gave energetic support. But he was always far ahead of the slow movement of average English opinion; and while English Liberals were hoping that the concessions carried out by Gladstone would make Ireland a contented partner in the Union, Bradlaugh had already given his assent to the claim for Home Rule; always, however, flatly opposing the doctrine of separation. On this he was explicit when, speaking in New York in 1873, he found otherwise friendly Irish auditors disposed to be satisfied with nothing short of absolute severance from England. Home Rule, however, he all along considered to be not only just but inevitable. While those of us who hoped for a real Union (with Irishmen admitted to perfect equality in the Executive system) were urging that as a solution which escaped the proved dangers of Federalism, he had made up his mind that Englishmen could not and would not ever deal with Ireland as an integral part of